Friday, April 27, 2012

If you’ve read anything about Cabin in the Woods, you probably know very little about the film except
that it’s supposed to be a genre-bending horror flick, its release has been
delayed for two years, it was written by Joss Whedon, it got crazy buzz at
SXSW, and it stars a now-famous
actor who looks much, much too old to be sporting a letterman jacket. Any
further details have been mostly deemed spoilers, though Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum managed to write a smart review
without divulging too much.

So if you’re looking for a great review that won’t spoil all
the surprises, stick with Schwarzbaum, because to convey how impressive this
movie is from a feminist perspective, this review will wrestle with all the
gory, gory details of the movie that no one wants to ruin for you.

Cabin in the Woods
is a film that not only plays with the conventions of the horror genre, it
exposes the falseness of gender stereotypes and lays bare what society is
really afraid of—losing socially constructed femininity and masculinity. The
film starts by introducing us to a group of professionals in an underground
bunker who are preparing for a mysterious event—the atmosphere and security is
reminiscent of a government defense contractor. We find out that their mission
involves five college students who are on their way to hang out in, yes, the
famous cabin.

The group of friends ends up being identified by the
contractors as fitting into the typified horror genre gang—the athlete, Curt;
the whore, Jules; the scholar, Holden; the joker, Marty; and the virgin, Dana. We
soon find out that the contractors are orchestrating a complex ritual to
sacrifice the group of unwitting students by letting loose supernatural
monsters to kill the group—in a specific order—as an offering to bloodthirsty, ancient gods who, if unappeased, will kill everyone on Earth.

The contractors lure the group to the cabin, heavily monitor
their movements, fabricate lethally advantageous environments, and even chemically alter
the young adults’ moods with adrenaline and libido-increasing hair dyes and
gases. Each of the victims’ statuses as archetypes of the
horror genre—and by extension, of society—depends solely on these
interventions. We see from the beginning of the film and through the characters’
own disbelieving dialogue that the athlete isn’t an alpha-male; he’s a brave
but sensitive sociology major. The whore isn’t a sexed-up Paris Hilton clone;
she’s funny, smart, and only blonde because the contractors manipulated her
into coloring her hair with chemically laced dye. The
scholar is smart, but he’s also handsome and strong. The joker is a pretty
hilarious pothead, but he’s also the one that sees through the manipulations
and ends up surviving improbably longer than any of the other victims, other
than the virgin—who is not, in fact, a virgin.

It might not seem so revolutionary that the five characters
don’t live up to the stereotypes that they’re being forced to play. Characters
seldom do fit into these types perfectly. But what’s interesting—and downright revolutionary—is that Cabin in
the Woods places these stereotypes at the center of the very existence of
the world and then lets the world to burn.

After some requisite killings by a zombie family that the
contractors let loose on the cabin group, we learn that the victims must not
only play the roles of the five types of people—they also have to die in a certain
order. And as anyone who has ever seen a horror movie can probably tell you,
that rule actually just means that it matters what order the women are killed
in—sluts first, prudes last. The men can die somewhere in the middle, and they
do. But the climax of the film comes when, against all odds, the joker and the
virgin not only escape from the sequestered woods, where they were trapped. The
pair also manages to break into the contractors’ compound and unleashes a
warehouse full of supernatural monsters that kill the very people who were
manipulating the cabin-goers’ fates. After finding their way to a temple where
the blood sacrifice is ultimately offered, the contractors’ stern director
(Sigourney Weaver) reveals that the only way for the world to be saved is for
the joker to die—the virgin can live or die according to the ritual, as long as
she’s the last survivor. In the end, the
pair decide that, if the world as we know it relies on this kind of sacrifice, maybe the
world should just end.

This message makes for a nonconventional horror movie (or
any movie) ending, that’s for sure. The last shot of adventure or horror films generally don't signal armageddon. But the sentiment behind the ending is what’s revolutionarily
feminist about this film. If, symbolically, society is based on sacrificing the
freedom to perform femininity and masculinity in whatever way you choose—if civilization
as we know it relies on these stereotypes for its very survival—then it
deserves to burn to the ground. There’s nothing morally redeemable in the
virgin killing the joker to keep this system intact. They both throw that option out and
embrace the end of the world, guessing that maybe it’s time for another
species to have a shot at life on Earth.

Cabin in the Woods
will likely get feminist criticism for maintaining some of the Mulveyan
conventions of classic narrative cinema, especially the let’s-stare-at-the-whore’s-ass
shot or the horror-flick staple of tainting sex scenes with violence. The film
could have made the same point about film and societal conventions without including these
stereotypical ways of simultaneously fetishizing and chopping up women’s bodies
onscreen.

But what saves this film from being dismissed as a typically misogynistic, if unique and very funny, horror movie is its statements about the
ominous, systematic way that people’s lives are disciplined. In this film, that is represented in the very real way that the contractors trap this group of
college students in an environment where they never had a chance to survive. And
although the plot begs an obvious question—why not just summarily execute these
five in the desired order—the answer seems simple to anyone who has ever read pessimistic
early film or Marxist theory. The fact that the victims are offered a choice of
which monster to invoke allows the powers that be to blame us for our own
demise, forgetting the fact that we were always only ever choosing
which way we would die. These particular victims refuse to make the ultimate sacrifice to the society of the
spectacle. And they take the system down with them.